Deutscher, Lenin, Trotsky and Marx all staked their claims on the belief that socialism would produce abundance and freedom. A horrifying history has shown irrefutably that it doesn’t. Socialism is really a theory of economic theft, and what it produces is poverty. Socialist systems are unable to foster the technological development necessary to sustain a modern economy. And they are fundamentally incompatible with human liberty. None of these four revolutionaries still admired by the left had a clue as to the critical importance of private property in making political liberty possible. None of them understood the necessity of a capitalist economy to technological progress and economic wellbeing. In the last half of the 20th century, vast masses of humanity—hundreds of millions in fact—were lifted out of subsistence poverty in those countries that protected and supported private property and free markets. This liberation by capitalist economics of poor working people so they are able to achieve lives of relative dignity and modest luxury represents a revolution unprecedented in the 5,000-year history of mankind.
(David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz, vol. II, Progressives [Los Angeles: Second Thoughts Books, 2013], 252)
